Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece (British Museum)
Back in the aeons of recorded time, there was a website called Cracked.com. It was made by very Bright Young Things who produced usually entertaining and sassy articles designed to ‘destroy’ the preconceptions of sophomoric early 20-somethings in given fields e.g. History. As a teacher today, I still use some of the precociously arranged fact-bites from Cracked’s 26 Comparisons That Will Destroy How You See History to shake some of my Yr7s out of their goldfish bowls.
However — as was probably inevitable for any site curated by people apparently of the same age group as its target audience — much of Cracked’s content was just as sophomoric (recently rechristened as ‘midwit’) as the mindsets it set to challenge.
I think namely of the desperately smug take on the 2007 film 300 (Why The Persians Should Be The Good Guys In ‘300’). It basically sets out the following:
1) If anyone represents ‘freedom’ in 300, it’s the Persians. The Persians built their Empire largely without the use of slavery, while ancient Sparta was a rigid hierarchy where a professional soldiery caste depended on the sweat of brutally oppressed serfs
2) The founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire — Cyrus the Great — was a multiculturalist who freed the Jews from captivity
3) The descendants of Gerard Butler’s Leonidas would go on to quisling up with the Persians out of jealousy at Athens’ later prominence — despite what widely panned sequel 300: Rise of an Empire would have us believe.
You won’t find any critique from me on 3) (do mind that Thucydides Trap, oh mandarins of the foreign and defence establishment). Nor would I deny the grim lot of the poor benighted helots in Laconia (1) or the beneficent tolerance of Cyrus the Messiah (2).
But it isn’t true that the Achaemenids “built that Persian Empire without slaves”, as more recent research has thankfully highlighted. Alex ‘Cracked’ Schmidtt in fairness does at least nod to this, with a winsomely Pravda-esque description of the conquered unfortunates as “a few long-term POWs”.
Yes, Cyrus founded a multicultural empire, but empires are multicultural by definition. “For in reality,” as Ed West put it
“…it is empires which are multi-cultural, and plucky rebels who tend to be linked by blood — whether it was ancient Greeks fighting off a Persian army of Medes, Babylonians, Egyptians and Sumerians, or Vietnamese nationalists in combat with French, Senegalese and North African troops.”
(To really skewer the myths of the day, skip us smarmy millennials and send in jaded, forgotten Gen X.)
It is with these petty decade-old quibbles mouldering in my mind that I enter Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece at the British Museum. Proving both Schmidtt’s and West’s point, the eyes are first drawn to what is seemingly a woodcut of an Egyptian pharaoh, honouring the god Anubis. It is in fact Darius I, from sometime after 525 BC when the ancient kingdom became an Achaemenid satrapie.
As a piece of propaganda, it is pitched perfectly; Darius stands to pay tribute to the important local deity, who sits regally at the image’s centre. It is, however, the only time we see a Persian emperor on his feet; an inlaid photo of a frieze at the National Museum of Iran shows Darius sat on his throne, with his feet raised above the ground on a platform. “His feet never touch the ground and incense burners sweeten the air he breathes” the caption explains.
Imperial multiculturalism cuts both ways, and it is most interesting to see those Greek leaders who did fall under Persian sway readily aping their ways. A marble from the Nereid Monument in Xanthos, Turkey depicts Arbinas, king of Lycia, receiving the surrender of a city on behalf of his Achaemenid masters; he sits with his feet raised in the Persian fashion, and with a parasol held above his head by an atten- ah you know what, I’m just going to say it: slave.
Another — also from the Nereid — shows him dressed as a Greek but with an unmistakeably Persian beard, and reclining as he drinks, while others stand. This was not the done thing at Greek symposia, where a playful egalitarianism reigned (the very word συμπόσιον sympósion derived from συμπίνειν sympínein, “to drink together”).
In fact, the politics of alcohol flow through the exhibition like undiluted wine down the gullet of a decadent satrap. A sarcastic line from Aristophanes establishes the theme:
“Those pitiless Persian hosts!
They compelled us to drink sweet wine, wine without water, from and gold and glass cups!”
The symbol of Achaemenid privilege at parties — besides lounging around while your friends and inferiors stood — was the rhyton, a decorated drinking or pouring horn, usually in the shape of an animal (the griffin was a perennial Persian favourite). These exploded in popularity in Athens after victory in the Persian Wars, along with all manner of products from the defeated foe and its satrapies — with a flush Pericles enlisted to explain:
“The greatness of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbour…the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as our own.”
But importing such foreign luxuries, while a sign of success, posed a problem. Conservative Athenians feared that luxury paved the way both to tyranny and weakness, and that democratic Athens would befall the same fate as its Persian foe.
They may have been reassured by the humorously demotic, even lewd, Greek interpretations of the once-great rhyton. Where the Persians drank from dignified, ornate receptacles made of gold, silver or bronze, a range of clay-based equivalents are exhibited, forming the shapes of variously an eagle, a hog, a ram and — most amusingly — a donkey-face in which any drinker would briefly take on the head of an ass as he swigged.
Elsewhere, the combination of drinking gear with asinine imagery is used to directly mock the defeated Persians: a jug shows a hopeless Persian, trying in vain to convince a stubborn donkey into battle. Greek-speaking satrapies also come in for opprobrium; Phrygia, which had passed from Lydian to Persian control during the 540s BC, is satirised — or indeed satyrised — through an urn showing the legendary Phrygian king Midas, with ass’ ears and feet raised of course.
Gender plays its role in the fun too: a grumpy Persian-faced mug is brought “face-to-face with his vanquisher” with every Greek sip, but insult adds to injury as two females — likely an Athenian woman and her Persian slave — stand above his head on the elongated rim.
There are other, more deliberate cultural fireguards too: remember Arbinas being shaded by a parasol, in the custom of an Achaemenid Emperor? Well now that the cultural tables have turned, the parasol has made it into mainstream Greek — specifically Athenian — usage. But there’s a catch: only women are depicted sheltering under parasols. As the caption has it:
“As women had no formal political status in democratic Athens, they could indulge in luxurious display without risk to the social order. The parasol, symbol of the Persian king’s authority, became a feminine accessory across the wider Greek world.”
And so if you’ve ever wondered why we across Western civilisation see the parasol as mother rather than father to the umbrella, it originates with the Athenian obsession with maintaining a radically democratic, but also guardedly masculine, polity.
Another luxurious red-flag was the importation of the peacock; a fundamentally useless bird, but a pretty one that even now we associate with profuse and obvious wealth. There is an account of one Athenian aristocrat pre-empting any political trouble by inviting the commoners in to see the strutting avians once a month, which makes me think of an ancient Greek Duke of Northumberland.
In the end it was not securing independence from Persia that generated decadent oriental despotism, but conquest of it. The final section of Luxury and Power focuses on Alexander the Great; we are taken full circle with a calcite statue of what appears to be an Egyptian pharaoh. It is of course an early Hellenistic king, perhaps Alexander himself or one of his immediate successors in Egypt, Ptolemy I or II. Alexander had declared himself the son of Zeus-Amon in 331 BC, fusing a Greek and an Egyptian divine identity. The Multicultural Empire Strikes Back.
Alexander’s invasion of the Persian heartlands made for an even starker adoption of the customs of the conquered. “Embracing luxury as a sign of power, Alexander modelled his rulership on the Achaemenid kings” the caption says. When he defeated Darius III (also in 331), he commanded his new subjects to practice proskynesis — to lower themselves before their ruler — which was nothing a Persian would not expect, if grating to be done before a foreigner. Alexander’s importation of this back to his native Macedonia in 327 caused consternation, and it is unclear whether he was immediately successful; his successors, however, were bowed to. Whatever faded memories of the great Athenian experiment had survived the Peloponnesian War meanwhile, had already been quashed by his father Philip’s conquest of the city-state in 339.
Wine is again invoked to epitomise these shifts in luxury and power: a phrase from a Persian poet of a much later era — Hafez of Shiraz (circa 1315–90):
“A bowl of wine is the Mirror of Alexander –
Look, it displays the state of King Darius’ realm to us.”
The exhibition finishes with a crotchety diagnosis from the Roman satirist Juvenal of that same cycle of hardiness-victory-luxury-decadence, apparently befalling the Greeks’ own conquerors by the 1st/2nd century AD:
“Now we are suffering
the calamities of long peace.
Luxury has settled down on us,
crueller than fighting, avenging the world
we’ve conquered…”
Some lessons for today, I’m sure.
The artefact that has made the biggest impression on me is an unassuming Greek phiale (shallow wine bowl) depicting the birth of Athena from Zeus’ head. No caption mentions that, and it’s a North American gentleman pointing this out to his English lady companion that gives me an opening:
“What interested me,” I say to the lady, for the gent has moved on, “is that whereas the Persians depict their kings with their feet raised, the Greeks depicted their gods — the king of their gods — with his feet on the ground.”
“Oh! Yes!” she replies, but in good 21st century relativist fashion adds “What I’d thought…was that his beard looks like a Persian influence.”
In my head it sounds like polite relativist nonsense, though looking back she may have a point. “Well,” I say “I’m Greek, so I am slightly biased I must admit.” She laughs and we go our separate ways.
Whether she’s right or wrong, I’m not sure, and this piece is too long anyway. But I’m positive I have a point too. Of course, if I do, then I have another stick to beat the Cracked worldview with: there is something, after all, to be said for a civilisation that depicted its gods with feet firmly on the ground, as opposed to one that insisted on consistently elevating its mortal rulers.
That isn’t to say the trendy Persia fans don’t have a point either. The trouble of course, is that we are all assessing both through lenses that are neither Hellenic nor Achaemenid, but Galilean.
